Giant French laser sparks weapons protest

作者：宋惨 发布时间：2019-02-27 07:14:01

By Charlene Crabb in Paris A LASER being planned in France, which will be as big as a football stadium, should be monitored by scientists from around the world to ensure that it is not used to develop weapons, says a group of leading physicists. When the Mégajoules laser near Bordeaux comes online in 2012 it will be one of only two of its size in the world. It will focus 240 laser beams for a few billionths of a second on a peppercorn-sized capsule containing hydrogen isotopes to induce small thermonuclear reactions. From measurements of what then happens, computers will create models of the explosions of full-scale thermonuclear bombs. France says it needs this research to maintain its nuclear arsenal now that it has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits explosive nuclear testing. But in an article in the June issue of the magazine Opto & Laser Europe, several leading scientists suggest that Mégajoules and its American equivalent, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, could be used to develop new types of weapon, such as bombs that do not use uranium fission to trigger explosions. Current hydrogen bombs require a uranium trigger. “These installations are potentially dangerous toys,” plasma physicist Sebastian Pease, former director of Culham Laboratory near Oxford, told New Scientist. “Lurking in the background is the possibility that if you can make a fusion explosion with a laser, you may be opening the route to making nuclear explosions without using plutonium or uranium. So it might become easier for people the world over to make nuclear explosions.” The French Atomic Energy Commission, which is behind the Mégajoules project,